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Tagging

Customised tags offer a convenient way to quickly add info and keep track of studies.

How to apply a tag

To add a tag to one or more studies, check the box to the left-hand side of those studies you wish to tag. Once a tag has been added to a study, it is visible to all reviewers on that review.

You can add a new tag directly from your screening page by typing in the "Tag with:" field and clicking "create new".

How to manage tags

You can also add tags from the 'Study tags' page under settings. Here you'll see a list of all of the tags currently being used in your review. Each of these has a red button to its right; clicking this button will delete the tag. Existing tags cannot be edited, only deleted.

'Awaiting classification' and 'Ongoing study tags'

Covidence comes pre-populated with two tags: Ongoing Study, and Awaiting Classification. These tags have two special properties: First, they cannot be deleted. Second, they are automatically counted and displayed on the PRISMA flowchart.

Viewing and using your tags

Once created and applied to studies, you can also filter by these tags. This can be especially useful to get a quick count of how many studies received each tag.

Note that the filter function counts and displays only studies in your current list. For example, if I am viewing the Title/Abstract Screening page, the filter will only display studies within the screening list, and will not display studies on the irrelevant list.

Tags (as well as any notes entered) will export with your reference lists to Excel/CSV:

Handy uses for tags!

Marking duplicates

It is not currently possible to manually mark duplicates that made it through Covidence's de-duplication algorithm.

Using tags, however, you can create a "Duplicate" tag and apply it to any duplicate studies identified by your reviewers. Once you've completed screening, use the filter function to get a count of how many duplicates were manually identified in your review.

Tracking conflicts

We hear from a lot of users that they'd like to be able to calculate Kappa statistics. While this is not currently available, using tags in a clever way can help you to be able to do this:

Beforeyou resolve any conflicts from a given stage, create a tag with a name like "TA conflict" (for title/abstract screening) or "FTR conflict" (for full text review), or anything that feels intuitive to your team. Apply this tag to all of your conflicts before resolving any of them.

Once the conflicts have then been moved forward to the next stage, you'll be able to use the filter function (as described above) to get a count of how many previous conflicts there were. In addition, this will make it much quicker to view the history of each of these conflicts, so you can see which reviewers had conflicting votes.

Assigning data extractions

Sometimes review teams have distinct expertise and consequently need for specific reviewers to perform specific studies' extractions. In this case, you might create and apply a tag indicating the reviewer who needs to do a particular extraction. Alternatively, they might create a tag with the study characteristics specific to a reviewer's area of expertise.